Criteo Formally Launches DSP and Monetization Solution Suite

Significant growth in retail media has created fragmentation across the industry that is holding retailers, brands and agencies back from reaching their full potential with retail media, according to a media release from Criteo.

In response, the commerce media company has formally launched Commerce Max, its self-service, demand-side platform (DSP), in an effort to provide brands and agencies a single point of entry to retail media inventory onsite and across premium publishers offsite.

Commerce Max

Criteo says it had been market testing the offering since 2022 with Best Buy and media investment company GroupM, an exclusive Alpha partner. During this period, Commerce Max enrolled 10 retailers including Best Buy, Macy's and Shipt. Criteo says retailers who have completed campaigns have more than doubled conversion rates on average when running both onsite and offsite advertising through the platform.

“Our focus is enabling all commerce-driven companies to buy and sell to audiences engaged in shopping,” Megan Clarken, CEO at Criteo, said in the release. “The process has to be frictionless, and it has to solve for fragmentation. With today’s launch, we’re equipping our clients with the right tools to cut through and connect in a more unified retail media ecosystem that ultimately creates more unity across the broader advertising marketplace.”

"Through Criteo, we now have one point of entry to a pivotal retail media network, all within a single platform — Commerce Max — that applies the same KPIs to retail media as those we use for our programmatic buys,” said Billy Dyer, club team shopper marketing lead at Unilever. “Combining onsite and offsite targeting enables us to focus media spend across a broader part of the shopper funnel while finding the most suitable audiences wherever they are.”

Now in general availability, brands and agencies across the globe can use Commerce Max to access data and inventory across multiple retailers and marketplaces as well as leverage closed-loop measurement.

In addition, Criteo’s partnership with Integral Ad Science allows brands and agencies to measure viewability and invalid traffic on a retailer’s site across all ad formats, including native and sponsored products, by 2024.     

Commerce Yield

The second component of Criteo’s latest launch is the company’s expansion of its core monetization technology and solution suite, Commerce Yield. The suite marks the next phase in the development of Commerce Yield and aims to equip retailers with the means to tap previously “unattainable demand” by facilitating the integration of marketplace and in-store monetization technologies, per the release.

The suite provides retailers and marketplaces with a complete media toolset, but also serves commerce companies such as automakers, movie theaters, transportation services and airlines.

Commerce Yield combines Criteo’s former retail media platform with several solutions derived from recent strategic acquisitions, including:

• Commerce Yield Marketplace: Through Criteo's acquisition of Mabaya, a sponsored product ad platform in Europe, Commerce Yield Marketplace aims to help monetization officers integrate marketplace tactics and formats.
• Commerce Yield In-Store: The merger of Australian-based Brandcrush and Criteo's in-store monetization technology, aims to provide advertisers access to a wider range of offline inventory.
• Commerce Yield Insights: Previously called Gradient, the platform offers a suite of insight and data tools providing digital-shelf insights to support enterprise-level retail media buys.